Evaluation of Document-Level Text Simplification in Japanese

Iori Yamashita, Hikari Tanaka, Hajime Kiyama, Kexin Bian, Zhousi Chen, Mamoru Komachi


Abstract
This study establishes an evaluation framework for document-level text simplification in Japanese by constructing a human-annotated dataset and examining the reliability of LLM-based automatic evaluation. We first developed detailed annotation guidelines covering four criteria—necessity, sufficiency, sentence-level simplicity, and document-level simplicity—and collected human ratings for 1,128 source–target document pairs derived from the Wikipedia part of the Japanese simplification corpus JADOS. Using this dataset, we conducted extensive experiments comparing human judgments with evaluations from large language models, including GPT, Claude, and Gemini. The results show that GPT-4o and Gemini 2.5 Pro achieve high agreement with human annotators even in the 0-shot setting, demonstrating their potential as reliable automatic evaluators for Japanese simplification. However, LLMs exhibited a consistent tendency to underestimate document-level simplicity, particularly for kanji-dense texts or texts with relatively long sentences and a small number of sentences. This work provides the first benchmark for evaluating document-level text simplification in Japanese and offers practical evidence that LLM-based evaluation can support scalable assessment for Japanese document-level simplification.
Anthology ID:
2026.lrec-main.85
Volume:
Proceedings of the Fifteenth Language Resources and Evaluation Conference
Month:
May
Year:
2026
Address:
Palma de Mallorca, Spain
Editors:
Stelios Piperidis, Núria Bel, Henk van den Heuvel, Nancy Ide, Simon Krek, Antonio Toral
Venue:
LREC
SIG:
Publisher:
ELRA Language Resource Association
Note:
Pages:
1092–1109
Language:
URL:
https://preview.aclanthology.org/ingest-lrec/2026.lrec-main.85/
DOI:
Bibkey:
Cite (ACL):
Iori Yamashita, Hikari Tanaka, Hajime Kiyama, Kexin Bian, Zhousi Chen, and Mamoru Komachi. 2026. Evaluation of Document-Level Text Simplification in Japanese. International Conference on Language Resources and Evaluation, main:1092–1109.
Cite (Informal):
Evaluation of Document-Level Text Simplification in Japanese (Yamashita et al., LREC 2026)
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PDF:
https://preview.aclanthology.org/ingest-lrec/2026.lrec-main.85.pdf